End of the Century (70 page)

It took only moments, but seemed longer. With the default protocols restored, the Dialectic was able to reach a decision immediately. The space-time into which it had collided was unsuitable for xenoforming. The Change Engine would withdraw immediately and return to the higher dimensions, there to drift and look for another suitable space-time.

The samples, of course, would be discarded.

Alice was floating in the heart, when Mervyn arrived.

His beard was full, his hair was long, and he wore some sort of full body armor, all of it bloodred.

“What have you
done
, you old fool?!” he screamed up at her, spittle flying, eyes wide and raging. “You've doomed us
both
!”

“Pleasure to meet you, Mervyn,” Alice said, falling in midair. “My name is Alice Fell. I believe this is our stop coming up.”

Mervyn raged, impotently.

Alice smiled. She could feel the Change Engine withdrawing from the universe. Beyond the phase boundary transition, the affected biosphere began to shrink. However, because it was moving backwards it time, she knew that to an outside observer it would appear to be getting larger. It hardly mattered. Soon it would be gone, and the contagion of the affected biosphere would never spread to engulf the whole world, the whole universe.

In the end, it was Alice herself who had been able to purge the corruption from the Dialectic and save the universe. She hoped that the transformed knight and the distributed consciousness of the ravens would be enough to protect her past, back in the future. But she needed to make sure that she was in the right place at the right time. Drawing on the tentative connections that still bound her to the White, she called upon that half of the Dialectic to perform one final favor for her. Reluctantly, the White agreed, as recompense for her assistance, and it delivered the message she had composed, transmitted out through the mirror-diamond skin of the Change Engine, back towards the point of first intrusion. A message to the future, intended for her own younger self, though others would doubtless intercept it over the centuries, catching fleeting glimpses. It would make for a difficult childhood, the confusing visions of Stillman, and London, and the phase boundary transition, and the ravens, but it would help ensure that she reached the appointed place at the appointed hour. This final task done, the White withdrew from her, leaving her alone.

Alice felt her insides shift as the Dialectic prepared to discard her and Mervyn as soon as the Change Engine pulled free of the universe. They would be set adrift in the higher dimensions, mere flotsam, and they would not survive for long.

She had only moments left to live, if that.

She just hoped that Stillman had been able to decode her message, and understood what the raven had been trying to say.

Alice closed her eyes.

She wasn't falling anymore.

SHE LAY IN RED-LIDDED DARKNESS
, but Alice was awake. She could feel the comforting weight of blankets over her legs, and when she shifted her head to one side ever so slightly, she could hear the soft rustle of hair on fabric.

Her body felt strange. Small. Light. Smooth.

She opened her eyes and tried to sit up. Her muscles moved oddly, their motions unfamiliar.

Alice lurched to a sitting position and looked down.

Beneath the off-white blanket was the outline of thin, short legs. A pea green, loose-fitting shirt covered her flat chest, leaving the thin, lithe arms bare. Her skin was darker than she remembered, almost the color of copper. She raised thin, almost elfin hands to her face and felt unfamiliar features beneath her fingers. Wide nose, prominent cheekbones.

“What's the last thing you remember, love?”

She started, her breath catching, and turned to look at the old man in the chair next to her. “D-Daddy?”

Stillman Waters smiled fondly, ice-chip blue eyes twinkling, and shook his head. “I'm afraid not, Alice. Just a friend.” He reached out and took one of her tiny hands in his, dwarfing it. “Now, what do you remember?”

“I…” Alice shook her head. She felt unconnected, disoriented. “Oh, I've had such a curious dream.” Her voice sounded high and piping in her ears, unfamiliar.

“And what a long sleep you've had,” came a voice from the other side of
the bed. Alice looked up to see a woman standing over her wearing a black jacket and slacks, her blonde hair in a bob that framed her thin face. She smiled down at her.

“Roxanne,” Alice said, absurdly. She turned back to Stillman, beginning to collect herself. “I was in the Change Engine. That's the last thing I remember. Inside the Unworld. I'd just finished uploading the dead man's mind into the disk, and programmed it with the genetic biological imperative to survive and communicate my message in the future, and had the White upload a copy of my own mind and memories on the disk.”

Alice paused, and looked around her, for the first time taking in her surroundings. She was in a hospital room, the light streaming through the open shutters. A TV mounted to the wall was on a twenty-four-hour news station, the sound muted. Alice didn't recognize the anchor or understand anything about what the crawl was saying. A war in Iraq?
Another
one?

“I got your message, love,” Stillman said, not letting go of her hand. “It took me some time, but I worked it out.”

“The Huntsman!” Alice laid her other hand on top of Stillman's, gripping it tightly.

Stillman smiled. “Seconds after you disappeared, the gem vanished altogether. Just about then the Huntsman was about to take off my head, but as soon as the gem was gone he collapsed like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Lifeless and dead.”

Alice nodded. That sounded about right.

“Anyway,” Stillman said, “when I worked out what the ravens had been trying to tell me, I got the disk from the junk pile in the Tower of London Station, and with Iain Temple's help was able to reverse engineer it, work out a way of retrieving the data stored within.”

“Temple survived?!” The last time Alice had seen him, he was being thrown out of a thirty-fifth-story window.

“There's more to that guy than meets the eye,” Roxanne said.

“That's putting it mildly.” Stillman nodded, and smiled. “At any rate, Temple agreed to help in exchange for exclusive rights to any technologies we derived from the disk for a period of one hundred years.” When he saw Alice's questioning look, he raised his hand. “Don't ask.”

“I'll tell you later, if you want,” Roxanne said, chuckling.

Alice looked from Stillman to Roxanne, confused. “You guys know each other? I don't…” She shook her head, still getting her bearings. What was it about this body?

“See,” Stillman began, “your comment about the woman in the photograph got me thinking. I figured it
had
to be the same woman, though how could it be? I found the number your Roxanne had written in your notebook and tracked her down living in Bayswater. It
was
the same woman, but we hadn't met yet.”

“But…” Alice began.

“The meeting Stillman remembered in 1947 was in my subjective future,” Roxanne explained, “though in the objective past.” She tapped the silver bracelet on her wrist and smiled. “I can time travel. Didn't I mention that?”

“It would have been useful if you'd
told
me that in the forties,” Stillman said, scowling playfully.

“Even then, there was some question about your allegiances, and we couldn't be sure you wouldn't hand me over to Omega. But I hedged my bets and gave you my phone number, didn't I? If you'd only bothered to use it, you could have found out for yourself.”

Alice was confused, and evidently it showed.

“The silver chalice that my mentor gave me,” Stillman explained. “The number written on the side, in Old Norse. It's her phone number.”

“What?!”

Stillman smiled. “See, Temple's people had worked out how to record and store new minds on the disk. As near as they could determine, there was room for two more uploads on the disk. But they were still working out how to retrieve you, and had already worked out that the other mind stored within was too corrupted to be retrieved. Anyway, while they figured it out, I gave the disk to Roxanne.”

“Why?” Alice raised an unfamiliar eyebrow.

Roxanne took over. “I went back to 1947 and told our mutual friend what was coming, and what was waiting for him atop that volcano in Iceland. I gave him the silver chalice, which I'd picked up in Iceland in the Middle Ages, and had my twenty-first-century phone number inscribed on it. I told him to give it Stillman.”

“Just to muck me about, I reckon,” Stillman said, crossing his arms over his chest. “You already
knew
I didn't find it.”

Roxanne shrugged. “Call it insurance. At any rate, I recorded our friend's mind, just like Stillman had asked. And not just his, but another friend of ours, as well. Then I returned to the twenty-first century, and Stillman and I set about finding suitable bodies.”

“What other friend?”

Stillman stood from his chair and went to retrieve a small hand mirror on a side table. “It took us a few years, but in the end we found two grown men and one little girl, all in permanent vegetative states. The previous occupants had checked out, if you like. It took some doing, and a fair number of pulled strings, but we got all three transferred to a hospital ward here in the United States and went to work with the disk.”

Stillman held the plastic mirror in front of Alice's face, and she saw a young Asian girl looking back at her.

“Seven years old,” Stillman said. “Never had a broken bone in her life, not even a chipped tooth. The injury that took her mind was a horrible tragedy, but proved a blessing in disguise for us.”

Alice reached up to touch her cheek, and watched the little girl in the mirror do the same. “It's…me.” She looked up at Stillman, at Roxanne, and then back at the mirror. “So it worked. The lifeboat
worked
.”

“And carried more passengers than you realized,” came a voice from the door. British, by the sound of it. Or possibly gay.

Alice turned to see the young white man standing in the doorway, a folded newspaper tucked under his arm. He was wearing a pastel blue linen suit over a yellow T-shirt, his hair and nails immaculate, sandals on his feet.

Or maybe both, Alice thought.

“This is my friend and mentor,” Stillman said, crossing the room to stand beside him. “Sandford Blank.”

“Charmed, my dear,” Sandford said with a bow. “I've heard a great deal about you.”

He entered the room, and behind him came another, a black man in his early thirties wearing pea green hospital pajamas like Alice's.

Stillman put his arm around the young white man and motioned to the
newcomer in the green pajamas. “And this is…” He raised his eyebrow. “What name
are
you using now, anyway?”

The black man smiled, his expression open, inviting. “I haven't quite decided, to be honest. I've had so many.” He began ticking them off on his fingers. “Johannes Lak. Jean Gilead. Giles Dulac. Jules Dulac. John Delamere.”

Alice swung her legs over the side of the bed and, unsteady as a newborn foal, stood. She held her hand out to the black man, who towered over her though he couldn't have been taller than six feet.

“Nice to meet you. I'm your granddaughter, Alice Fell.”

The black man's eyes widened, as did Roxanne's and Sandford's. Stillman, though, hid a knowing smile.

Alice was pleased. It was nice to know that she had a few surprises up her sleeve still. “Do you remember Naomi?”

The black man held her hand a little tighter and smiled, fondly. “Like it was yesterday. Literally.” He leaned forward, expectantly. “Is she still…?”

He trailed off when he saw the answer in her eyes.

“Well. Even so.” He smiled down at her, looking for all the world like a proud father seeing his child for the first time. “It is
very
nice to meet you. Please, call me Galaad.”

Alice held his hand for a moment longer, then released it. This would take some getting used to. “This feels…” She looked around the room, at old friends and new. “How odd. What a strange way for things to end, after all of this time.”

“Oh,” Sandford said, arching an eyebrow, “this isn't the end, my dear. This is only the end of the beginning. Only the beginning of the end of the beginning.” He pulled the folded newspaper from under his arm and waved it like a torch, then pointed to the television bolted on the wall, the text crawling with news of wars and rumors of wars, of empires clashing, of individuals oppressed and freedoms denied. “I've been catching up on history a bit, and believe me, there is a
lot
of work for us to do.”

“Us?” Alice raised an eyebrow.

Sandford smiled, and put one arm around Stillman, the other around Roxanne. “And why not? How many of us are given a second chance at life, my dear? Should we waste such a precious gift?”

“It would be good to make a difference,” said Galaad. “To help make a better world.”

“Why not, indeed?” Stillman laughed. “It isn't as if I've got anything better to do.”

“I've got some time on my hands,” Roxanne said. “Count me in.”

Alice smiled. She would never be sure if this wasn't another dream, after all, another mad vision. But it didn't matter, not any more. After all, what was life but a dream? This would, at least, be a dream worth living.